


Insignificance

by InsaneTrollLogic



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Dark, Gen, Manipulation, Time Travel, paradoxes, worst case scenario
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5895538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsaneTrollLogic/pseuds/InsaneTrollLogic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tell a room full of people they don’t matter and they’ll instantly decide to prove you wrong. And untrained crew members, desperate to make a name for themselves, are the type of people who make mistakes.</p><p>Rip’s counting on it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insignificance

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty much everyone dies. Don't say I didn't warn you.

With Carter gone, Kendra makes stupid mistakes. There are versions of Carter scattered throughout the timeline, incomplete pieces of him that fill the empty spaces in wrong ways. Versions that don’t know her name, that don’t know her past. She never approaches the versions that have already met her counterpart, but she brushes by them on the streets, hungry for contact she never thought to fully enjoy.

Reincarnates are delicate. Especially paired reincarnates. Their lives repeat, but the interval is relatively fixed. They go to Grenada in the eighth century and Carter dies fighting the Moors. The Crimean peninsula in 1854 where Savage murders the pair of them before they even realize who they are.

Rip watches the changes in her eyes. The desperation growing.

It’s only a matter of time before Kendra’s little mistakes become larger.

Only a matter of time before she decides to stay.

* * *

There is no such thing as an insignificant person.

There are lynchpins yes, moments that even a time master cannot change without severe consequences.

But the rest?

The rest of it is malleable. Loose threads.

And loose threads, well, they can be pulled.

And if you’re very, very careful, even those lynchpin moments can start to unravel.

* * *

Ray dies in the Great Chicago Fire.

He doesn’t know it’s the Great Chicago Fire at the time. Kendra’s in the sky with Firestorm, Rory on the ground with Snart attempting to distract Savage as Ray sneaks in unseen. Rip doesn’t see if it is Firestorm or Rory’s gun, but all of a sudden the barn’s on fire. Savage smirks at them, leaving the scene as Ray grows to full size, hand to his communicator, demanding information on how to contain the growing blaze.

Rip watches him with a detachment mastered in his training. This is part of history. If they were here or not, the outcome was going to be the same. This city was always going to burn.

And Ray, diving in and out of smoke filled buildings trying to pull as many people to safety as he can… Ray gets caught in a flashover and burns with it.

* * *

Martin Stein erases himself from existence.

Rip’s suspected this end since their first mission, when Stein had watched his wedding band fade. Stein had a lot of pride and while he’s careful about interfering in his own life after that, he’s never met his grandfather before.

His grandfather who worked on the Manhattan Project. Who is all too willing to talk when Stein engages him.  He never met his grandfather before. Doesn’t make the connection to the name now.

Stein engages his grandfather in a two hours debate about fission vs. fusion and his grandfather doesn’t notice the love of his life when she passes him by.

* * *

Leonard Snart dies the same way he would have if Rip left the timeline intact.

He dies cold gun in hand, fingers slipping off the dead man’s switch as his blood stops pumping. He dies a hero’s death, saving the whole of Central City.

In the original timeline, he transitioned to this role slowly. Made the slow ascent from the Flash’s adversary, to his grudging ally, to an on-call member of team Flash. The change was visible. Captain Cold would switch side mid-fight if one of his partners crossed a line. He and his sister fought shoulder to shoulder with the CCPD during an alien invasion and at the end of the day, every single member of the force turned the other way while they left the scene. When he died, he saved the Flash. When he died, he left an impression, a path for other villains to follow. A way to earn something like redemption.

In this timeline, his sacrifice is not remembered.

He dies a hero, the way he was always supposed to die. But he wasn’t working with the Flash at the time, wasn’t a visible symbol of redemption. Barry doesn’t know who bought him the precious seconds he needed to recover. Lisa doesn’t go to STAR labs to commiserate, doesn’t carve herself a place at Cisco’s side. Petty criminals don’t see the example and realize their path hasn’t been set.

Leonard Snart dies and he takes a myriad of would be heroes with him.

* * *

Mick takes a bullet for him.

Rip doesn’t even see the shooter. Didn’t think Mick liked him enough to save his life.

But he’s there one minute and the next, he’s gone.

Jax shoves him toward the door, Sara turning resolutely to cover their retreat.

When he’s safe on the Waverider, the team retreating to their bunks, he finds himself on all fours, puking into the toilet.

It’s hard to picture his son’s face.

Instead, he pictures Mick Rory, his mouth set in a grim line.

* * *

Martin gone, Jax inherits the whole of the Firestorm Matrix. He stops wearing jackets, bumps up the temperature. Sara and Kendra don’t realize what it means. Don’t understand that the Firestorm Matrix needs two for stability. That anything less becomes problematic.

Jax doesn’t recognize the signs either, but Rip tracks them ardently. His fainting spells, his ever growing core temperature. The kid hides the worst of it, makes his job easier. Or may he just doesn’t understand. Stein never liked to talk about his time with Ronnie Raymond, never liked to talk about the time the two of then ignited in a nuclear blast. Even then, Stein is only half-remember, a timeline remnant.

When Jax starts to go critical, he doesn’t have enough time to figure out a solution. Stein spent weeks looking for a replacement and he only found one with the help of STAR labs.

He meets Rip’s eyes. Glances to Kendra and Sara. He says, “Get them back to the ship.”

“What about you!” Kendra cries.

“There’s no time,” Jax says.

“Someone is going to pay for this,” Sara fumes, but has to get away if she wants to survive.

Jax shoots into the sky, anything to minimize destruction potential. To give his friends every chance to survive.

When Jax ignites, he flattens almost 800 miles worth of forest.

The incident becomes a legend, one of time’s greatest unsolved mysteries.

Jax’s body is never found.

* * *

Kendra runs away with a past version of Carter.

“We’re not a team anymore,” Kendra says. “You can see that. We were supposed to beat Savage, I still want to beat Savage, but I need to do it with Carter.”

This Carter Hall is named James Reid. He’s a twenty two year old bartender at a speakeasy in New York. He doesn’t remember his past, but his eyes light up when Kendra walks into the bar.

“Here’s looking at you, kid,” Sara quotes absently as she watches them.

This incarnation of Carter is meant to die in WWII. Kendra’s past self is an army nurse. Savage finds them both after the Battle of the Bulge.

But with Kendra in the past, this Carter doesn’t go to war, doesn’t meet his time appropriate reincarnate.

And for the first time in thousands of years, the cycle of reincarnation is disrupted.

It never recovers.

* * *

“What did he promise you?” Sara asks.

It’s just the two of them left and while Sara can take him in a fight, they’re on his ship. There are failsafes in place. Still, he plays dumb. “Who?”

“Savage,” Sara replies. “If I learned one things on this ship, it’s that there’s no such thing as coincidence. There was a reason you picked us. Eight of us from the same time period. You had the whole of history to choose from and you picked eight people from January 21st 2016\. I don’t buy it.”

Manipulating people closer to the event holds the potential for catastrophe. Rip has done his calculations. Eight people. Not the kind of people who are essential to the timeline, but people whose absence might shape it. He picks his words carefully. “Everything the time masters evolved to protect, it can be traced back to the Flash. Your time is one of the most chronologically unstable time periods in the whole of human history. Of course I would pick my team from that era.”

Sara waves a hand. “Dark matter, explosion, blah, blah. You’ve got an end game. It’s something to do with Vandal Savage. At this point I’ve fought him enough to know that we, all of us, we were threats. What did he promise you?”

Oh, she’s good. Of all the people he’d picked, he’d never expected it would be Sara who confronted him. He supposes that, after watching her friends die, she’s earned the truth. “He promised me my son.”

“Your son is dead,” Sara snaps. “You can’t change it. And Savage can’t get him back. Last I checked, time travel was the one skill he hadn’t picked up.”

“He wanted me to remove a threat. He was going to lose. He saw that he was going to lose. So he offered me a deal. If I would ease his rise to power, he wouldn’t slaughter my family.”

“He can’t promise you that. It’s the past for him.”

“The past can be changed,” Rip says, advancing on her. “You need a great deal of finesse and the right people, but if you pull the right threads, the entire tapestry starts to shift.”

Sara reaches for a knife.

Rip says, “Gideon!”

The AI activates the ships preventative measures kicked in. An immobilization field. One of the time masters’s more useful tools. Wouldn’t do to have a rouge on a time ship.

Sara’s jaw works. “Rip, this won’t work. We can stop it. Find another way. You and me.”

“I really wish that was true.” Rip draws his gun.

“Even if he’s telling the truth, even if you get your son back. What kind of a life are you condemning him to under Savage’s rule?”

“Any life’s better than none at all,” Rip answers.

Sara dies angry.

This time, she doesn’t come back.

* * *

The time masters are carefully chosen. They are screened for their ability to detach, for their willingness to watch the tragedies of the past without interacting. They are taught how to manipulate, which strands that can be pulled. Which events must happens. They are discouraged from familial ties, anything that might sway his allegiance to the timeline.

Rip careens back toward his present.

He’s tried this before. Rearranged the world at Savage’s whim, hoping that this time he’d come home to his wife, to his son.

And if he was wrong…

Well, there’s always another thread to pull.


End file.
